Will website owners be punished for being hacked?

Will website owners be punished for being hacked? This is a question that has been asked many times by websites owners, law enforcement, ISP’s networks, hosts, the list really goes on and on. How much responsibility do you have as a website owner? Luckily as of 2016 you are safe. There has not been one conviction or law suit against a site owner that was hacked. With that said, there are repercussions you should take into note. ISP’s have strict rules with websites that have been hacked and require an investigation in most cases before re-opening the website. These investigations are fast and are normally settled within 48 hours if the proper information is supplied. The information needed is why the hack happened and what is done to secure the security risk.

The most common websites that get hacked are WordPress websites. These sites use PHP an active website code that allows external code to change the page. WordPress supplies updates every couple months to keep it safe. This means if you keep your WordPress up to date and do not have a plug in or template that is not safe you will not have an issue. Unfortunately this means you need to check your wordpress often to see if an update is available. Our easy to use App Installer in the CPanel auto updates WordPress so you don’t need to worry about security risks if you use the this to add WordPress.

There is also auto update plug ins if you installed WordPress manually.

If your site is hacked, we suggest removing the whole site and adding a new one with non of the PHP files used on the previous site. This is needed because besides that hack the hacker can make any PHP file a backdoor to get back in. Removing the hacked files rarely fix the entire issue. You can re-use the database and any media files like images and videos. Be careful re-adding folders, hackers like to drop new files in folders that wouldn’t check to get access again. For example the media folders are prime target for this.

The safest way to have a website that cannot be hacked is to have a HTML based website. With HTML 5 and Java almost all websites needs can be made without PHP.